Vulgar and outrageous, the Republican candidate for the White House is distinguished by a very poor vocabulary, which does not prevent him from being once again at the gates of power. Translator and author of “The language of Trump” (Les Arènes, 2019), Bérengère Viennot helps us decipher the phenomenon.
As the next American presidential election approaches, Donald Trump is making headlines again, with a speech which, far from moderating, seems to have become even tougher. Vulgar, simplistic, and often riddled with mistakes, his language does not prevent him from being two steps from the Grail, once again. Bérengère Viennot, translator and author of Trump's language (Les Arènes, 2019), explores for Marianne the springs of a seemingly disjointed but formidably effective communication.
Marianne : In your book, Trump's languageyou analyzed Trump's language as vulgar and full of syntax errors. And since then?
Bérengère Viennot: It didn't get better, and during the last months of the campaign, he particularly let go. Donald Trump has always shown great contempt towards those he considers to be “losers”, whether soldiers who died in combat or mutilated, illegal migrants who represent for him the pinnacle of failure, but also women, whom he views from the height of his machismo as instruments of men's pleasure.
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All this vulgarity was already very apparent when he was president. At the time, he was still surrounded by a courtyard which slowed him down a little – just a little! – and guided him on what to say and do. Today it's a free electron who must save his skin. If he is not elected, he has a lot to lose; he risks falling into disrepair, going to prison. So he's doing what got him elected the first time: playing Trump. He passes off his vulgarity as frankness and his speechlessness as spontaneity, which, in his eyes, corroborates the thesis according to which he is an honest man who does not speak the language of wood. It works.
Imagine a Trump who would be neither excessive, nor vulgar, nor conspiratorial, who would try to convince with rational political arguments. Do you think he would have any chance of succeeding? He would just be an old orange man who is trying to get into politics and who obviously knows nothing about it. Despite his time in the White House and his political ambitions, Donald Trump is still not a seasoned politician. On the other hand, he remained a very good communicator.
How do you explain that a candidate for the presidential election, a former president to boot, can have such a poor level of language?
It is indeed always a surprise. When we listen to old recordings of Trump, from the 1980s for example, we see that he was able to give a more rational, more thoughtful and more composed speech. I think his way of speaking is part of a political strategy. There has been a lot of talk about “fascism” in recent days, since John Kelly, his former chief of staff, said the word about him. However, there have always been language mechanisms in Trump that were reminiscent of those of fascism; this was already very visible during his first mandate.
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Its vocabulary is very limited, both in number of words and quality of nuance, its syntax very confusing. However, if you look at researchers who have analyzed the language of Nazism, for example, like Victor Klemperer from 1933 in Germany, or closer to us, Olivier Mannoni, author, among others, of Translate Hitleryou realize that the mechanisms of leaders and regimes that aspire to dictatorship are always the same, and that they are entirely salient in Donald Trump: a primary vocabulary, which prevents the formulation of complex thought and therefore the ability to achieve nuances in speech; a disjointed syntax, which creates intellectual chaos and facilitates the imposition of arbitrariness.
Olivier Mannoni says that “Extreme simplification of speech constitutes the surest path to violence.” Now, that's what fascism is: complex non-thinking, the arbitrariness of rules (you never know if you're not breaking one) and, of course, total loyalty to the man in power. On this, Donald Trump is clear: for him, loyalty to himself is more important than loyalty to the Constitution of his country.
How can we explain that his voters are not put off?
Donald Trump's voters were won over in 2016 by a guy who bragged about kicking the anthill of theestablishment of Washington. We can say that from this angle, he kept his promise. Many Americans have never recognized themselves in a black, intellectual president, a pure product of the country's intellectual elite, nor in Joe Biden, who was his vice-president.
Not everyone studies, not everyone eats tofu steaks washed down with gluten-free smoothies in Manhattan or San Francisco. There is a middle America, Republican, whose concerns are above all economic and migration (whether or not they link the two subjects) and Donald Trump continues to speak to them. Under his presidency, until Covid-19, the economic record was rather good, notably because it was the legacy of the Obama years, but he takes credit for it and promises to do it again. And he prides himself on being the president of peace.
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We are very surprised that women voted for him, even though he contributed to the abolition of the right to abortion in several states – but not all women are pro-abortion! And others have different priorities, like inflation or immigration. Furthermore, delegating the decision on the right to abortion to the state level is to fuel the anti-federalism dear to Republicans. In short, there are plenty of reasons to vote for Trump, when we are more focused on short-term interests than on major democratic principles. It may be deplorable… but it’s human.
